Main menu

The Villa of Ormen

Art On The Web

It’s not often that I go to a Tumblr site and just can’t pull away. However, the well curated site - The Villa of Ormen - did just that, pulled me in for an extended darkly fantastic voyage. If you like otherworldly, surreal, mysterious imagery with haunted overtones, this is the bomb. Bits of words of wisdom, philosophical quotes and symbolism also sprinkle this site, in between the stunningly gorgeous images. Black and white, sepia and gray hues prevail as the color palette.

A wonderworld to feast your eyes and soul on, treat yourself to at least an hour for all the eye candy. I’ve culled some of my favorite images from the site here. Unfortunately, the creator’s name is often missing, such is the world of Tumblr.

A Side Note: I found this site because of a connection someone attested to, implying this Tumblr was set up by David Bowie before his death. (How do these things get started?) However, there is a line in Bowie’s song Blackstar - “In the villa of Ormen, in the villa of Ormen” - thus began the connection which of course snowballed with all the Bowie fans wanting more… The author of the site has posted a number of times that he/she is not David Bowie and has nothing to do with him (see screen shot below).

Ormen is a Norwegian word meaning serpent. The Villa of Ormen means the town of the serpent, or something similar. Bowie says that The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels as one of his favorite books. This is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page on the Gnostic symbol of the serpent.

“The ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. The ouroboros often symbolizes self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things such as the phoenix which operate in cycles that begin anew as soon as they end. It can also represent the idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting from the beginning with such force or qualities it cannot be extinguished. While first emerging in Ancient Egypt and India, the ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations, where it symbolizes the circular nature of the alchemist’s opus. It is also often associated with Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Hinduism.”